It’s a week before the biggest day of her life, and Anna Williams is multitasking. While waiting to hear back from the Ivy League colleges she’s hoping to attend, the seventeen-year-old senior at one of Manhattan’s most exclusive private schools is doing research for a paper about organic farming in the West Bank, whipping up a batch of vegan brownies, and, like an increasing number of American teenagers, teaching her dog, José Saramago, to use an iPad.

And goes on to touch on other favorite topics of New York Times readers such as Obama's dog, black-Jewish relationships, Mandarin-immersion programs, and neuroscience, but revolves back to conclude with Topic One:

Six months ago, Anna started her own bocce club. It’s already one of the most popular extracurricular activities at her school.

Will bringing bocce to the Upper East Side be enough to get Anna Williams into Harvard, Yale or Princeton? She’ll find out next week. Until then, she’s got her hands full: José Saramago just learned how to use Twitter.

So, you might think that Ron Unz's "The Myth of American Meritocracy," which is crammed with more info about elite college admissions than anything published in years, would have made quite a splash. And, indeed, when mentioned, it tends to elicit voluminous comments (e.g., 363 on Marginal Revolution). So, since the news media lives for traffic, they must be all over this, right?

Discrimination against Asians at elite colleges is generally acknowledged and there's some research on it, but the really interesting part of Unz's article is of course his claims about favoritism for Jews and a bias against gentiles. I don't trust Unz's numbers because he always uses numbers like a lawyer rather than a scientist, but I'd love to see some researcher look into it. Unfortunately, it would probably be a career suicide to study this.

Reading this entry reminds me my daughter's ACT exam is tomorrow. It's changed a lot since 1987: the day before the test they are issued ACT "admission tickets" complete with a photo of the student, a "Match Number" that's gotta line up with something at some point, and what looks like a souper-secret code of some sort.

They take it so far that they randomly assign testing rooms when you arrive to take your ACT: "ROOMS WILL BE ASSIGNED" the sheet screams out in ALL-CAPS, right above the legend "You will NOT be admitted without both this ticket AND one of the following forms of I.D." Serious business, the whole thing has become I reckon.

Oh well: at least she can vote by simply showing up at a random polling station and saying "Boo!" :-)

After reading about Walter Francis White, perhaps caucasions should claim we are black and benefit from affirmative action.

Why? Walter White had blonde hair, blue eyes and pale skin, yet he lead the NAACP for decades.According to Wiki, "five of his great-great-great-grandparents were black and the other 27 were white. All of his family were light-skinned, and his mother Madeline was also blue-eyed and blonde."

Good call! She came within an eyelash of #3, actually, and has a cousin on one side of the family who is an "Ashley" and a cousin on the other side who is a "Brittany": the domestic consensus in the Sylvester household finally settled on a Megan.

And her father is very proud of her - as is her mother, my wife - even though I cringe at the country she is inheriting. It's not the country her great-grandfather imagined he was going off to fight for and preserve for his posterity when he enlisted in the Army Air Force in 1942 out of Carthage, Missouri. It would be nice to have a piece of that America back, actually. But I digress.

My prediction (to Unz) was that his very significant essay would be received with a deafening silence. The victims in his model are the two least politically active groups in the United States (non-Jewish whites and Asians). The winners were the loudest and most active (blacks, Hispanics, and Jews).

While it may seem that Unz's article is being universally ignored, I'd be willing to bet that in certain precincts, such as Jewish organizations, a response is even at this moment being prepared, in the event that it should get wider attention.

I also suspect that within the elite college admissions bureaucracy, there are those who will try to figure out what's going on here, even if they know perfectly well it can never be spoken of publicly, or even openly within their own ranks.

After the welfare checks were delayed due to foul-ups by a diversity of affirmative action hires, liquor stores and pawn shops in the community were looted by a diversity of rioters. After order was restored, a divesrity of protesters showed up and marched with missspelled signs, chanting grammatically incorrect slogans.

... palestinians being driven off their land by the thousands,tortured beat up, murdered, denied water but the.. but NYT readers can re-assure themselves that organic tomatoes are growing on the west bank

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